25 Quotes By Tom Stoppard


Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard on age

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard on age

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
Tom Stoppard on age

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard on art

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard on art

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard on art

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard on attitude

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
Tom Stoppard on beauty

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
Tom Stoppard on change

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
Tom Stoppard on change

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Tom Stoppard on design

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
Tom Stoppard on education

I write out of my intellectual experience.
Tom Stoppard on experience

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
Tom Stoppard on freedom

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
Tom Stoppard on future

It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard on government

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard on health

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard on imagination

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
Tom Stoppard on music

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
Tom Stoppard on power